“Whatever it is,” Sayyid said, “it seems to be moving fast.” Of course, that was relative. Although Vangarde wasn’t moving at anywhere near relativistic speeds, the Great Rock still retained a fair amount of momentum from the days of the Passage.

Sayyid recalled a story that Great-Grandmother Zafirah had shared with him when he was little. She had spoken of [156] an energetic wave or disturbance of some sort that had swept through the Earth’s solar system more than a century earlier. One of the planet’s space-based telescopes had observed the phenomenon’s unexplained superluminal passage across the plane of the ecliptic. The anomaly had apparently destroyed the Ares IV,the first manned ship bound for Mars.

As a small child, Sayyid had always wondered if the Mars ship had actually somehow survived its encounter with the unexplained on that fateful day. Might Loot Kelly’s little vessel have simply been kicked out among the stars, arriving at some impossibly far destination intact, the way the Vangarde colony had been dislocated a generation later? Because of his own life circumstances, Sayyid could never discount such possibilities out of hand.

Maybe this is another weird energy anomaly like the one that took theAres. And maybethis one is going to punt usback to Earth.

Earth. He wondered if the place could be anything like the Earth of his dreams, the Earth conjured by the many stories Greatgran Zafirah had shared with him before entropy and her old Tusker wounds had finally taken her—

“Enough dustgathering,” Graben snapped, startling Sayyid from his peaceful torpor. “I need an analysis of this thing. Could it be hiding another aggressor ship?”

Sayyid shrugged. “Can’t rule it out, Boss.” He was old enough to remember the asteroid miners who had landed several craft on the Vangarde’s skin, only to be “persuaded” to leave by a complete fusillade from the colony’s Baruch pulse cannons. Afterward, he’d sneaked into the pathology lab where one of the recovered alien corpses lay on a slab, evidently dead from exposure. He’d never forget how much like a Vangarde Oldster the thing had looked.

Except for its sickly green bodily fluids and those sinister-looking pointed ears.

Still floating in space and watching the images coming in [157] from the external telescopes, Sayyid heard Graben begin barking orders to the others. He heard the echoing clatter of the big Baruch tubes being locked and loaded again. Sayyid felt a cold sweat trickling between his shoulders, as though an enraged Tusker were breathing down his back.

Suddenly, the glistening silver band of spatial distortion greatly increased in size. Before a scream could escape Sayyid’s lips, the effect seemed to have entirely engulfed Vangarde, which lurched and shuddered, tossing him from the couch onto the cold, rigid deckplating. The universe was plunged into utter darkness.

Sayyid didn’t realize that he’d blacked out until he noticed that Graben and Keller were lifting him bodily back onto the virt couch. The lights were dim, as though whatever had struck the asteroid had also knocked out the main power circuits.

The scene reminded him eerily of Greatgran Zafirah’s story about How Vangarde Got Way Out Here.

“What happened to my virt-helmet?” Sayyid said, searching around on the floor in the semidarkness until his feet came into contact with the helmet’s curved surface. He wrapped his footthumbs around its edge and donned it using both feet while his hands and tail sought out the emergency power controls.

Almost at once, he was back Out There.

He saw right away that everything was ... different.The stars were far more densely packed now than they had been mere moments before. Neither of the Magellanic Clouds was anywhere to be seen.

Beyond the main mass of stars lay a vast, multiarmed pin-wheel of light that reminded Sayyid of the tridee maps of the Milky Way he’d made in school.

It took several days of painstaking comparative positional analysis of every known pulsar and black hole in the astronomical database before Sayyid was able to account for the [158] presence of the additional stars, the gigantic spiral galaxy that dominated the stellar backdrop, and the complete and utter disappearance of both Magellanic Clouds.

The result was both unbelievable and undeniable. In a twinkling, the anomaly had tossed Vangarde almost dead-center insidethe smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds, some 210,000 light-years from the asteroid’s previous position.

Slowly, very slowly, Sayyid allowed the truth of his discovery to sink in. Compared to the distance we just covered, those first two-hundred light-years the Oldsters crossed when they made the Passage from Earth look like a rounding error.

Gazing at. the pearlescent brilliance of the Milky Way, Sayyid began to understand that the Earth of his fantasies, the Earth of Greatgran Zafirah’s stories, hopes, and dreams, was now forever beyond the reach of the ’Neal People and their descendants. He wondered if the Tuskers had ever ventured out this far.

Or if something even worse might dwell here.

PART 5

GRIEF

Chapter 14

Though several minutes had passed since the battle’s abrupt end, the anticipated phalanx of Tholian vessels still had yet to arrive. However, Ensign Fenlenn had detected the approach of four Tholian warships, evidently rushing toward the colony world in response to its distress calls. With the warships still nearly an hour away, Excelsiorremained on yellow alert. The damaged Neyel vessel—the cause of the entire situation—merely hung silently in space, apparently refusing to acknowledge all hails and offers of assistance.

To Lojur, it almost seemed as though the alien ship was mocking him.

Standing alone on Excelsior’saft observation lounge, the Halkan navigator wondered what could be going on inside the Neyel vessel’s thick, refractory metal hull. As the minutes passed, he could feel the increased vigilance and nervousness of the crew emanating from the bulkheads, like some strange new form of radiation.

But he didn’t care about any of that just now. His shift on the bridge finished, Lojur now looked out of the enormous curved transparent aluminum window that ringed most of the lounge. Located one level below and slightly behind the bridge, the room overlooked the flat dorsal section of the primary hull. Although neither the equally vast lower [162] engineering section nor the saucer’s two gigantic impulse engines were visible from this vantage point, the faint blue glow of the twin warp nacelles seemed to stretch out to infinity behind the mighty starship. Beyond that lay the eternal, boundless dark.

It was also about the farthest point across Excelsior’ssaucer section away from the ruined phaser bay where Shandra had died, defending a colony of inscrutable aliens whose military caste was likely to arrive at any moment, weapons blazing. Lojur hoped they would forgive Excelsior’sintrusion into Tholian territory once the captain explained that they had come in answer to distress signals from the Tholian colony world. But from what he’d seen of the Tholians so far, he wasn’t too sure about that.

To Excelsior’sstarboard side lay the slender yellow crescent of the Tholian colony world the Neyel had attacked. To port, the apparently crippled Neyel warship made a slow, unpowered circuit about the planet, still evidently unable either to change its trajectory or to mount any further hostilities.

Lojur was distracted from the alien ship by a reflection in the window. He almost failed to recognize the drawn and worn face he saw there as his own. Set beneath thick, pale brows, his eyes seemed absent, their hollow shadows far darker than his russet-colored goatee. Clearly visible in the middle of his ashen forehead was the red crest of his family, tattooed there nearly two decades earlier, after the village Elders had declared him an adult, a True Man of Halka.